Several monster planets have been discovered by looking for the wobbles in a star's spectrum caused by a planet's to-and-fro tugging of its parent.
Each telescope has a mirror just 10cm across, yet working together they detected the microscopic dimming caused by a planet getting in the way of the distant star.
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The most basic of the indexes rates a world's suitability for life based on its place within a habitable zone, which is calculated by a planet's distance from its parent star, the star's luminosity and temperature.
Renowned planet hunters Geoffrey Marcy and Paul Butler made the dramatic announcement last week that they had seen a dimming in the light coming from HD 209458 and said it was caused by a planet passing in front of the star.
So it would be nice to test those models by observing a planet whose atmosphere is already well known: Venus.
Only when a comet arriving from the Oort cloud has its orbit tweaked by a close encounter with a planet does it settle into a more regular existence.
The mercantilist empires of the day put this philosophy into action by competing in a planet-wide land-grab that lasted a couple of centuries.
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These rocks landed on Earth about 2.5 million years ago, after being blasted off the Red Planet by a violent impact.
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Discovered in far eastern Russia, the quasiperiodic crystals (to give them their full name) were found in an environment that scientists claim would have been unable to foster them naturally, leading them to the conclusion that they were brought to this planet by a meteorite.
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Even on a planet ruled by women, they are only rulers because they are in fact ruling it like men.
But instead of an ominous sci-fi vision of a planet run by robot overlords, they envision a world that will be shaped, for better or worse, by us.
This revolution will reinvent our economic system, to ensure the sustainability of life on our planet by developing a world of prosperity for all in a low carbon economy.
This October, Richard Garriott, a computer-game developer and son of former NASA astronaut Owen Garriott, is scheduled to become Space Adventures' sixth client to leave the planet followed by a seventh yet-to-be identified passenger next April.
The G8 nations also committed themselves to reducing their carbon emissions by at least 80% by 2050 (as part of a plan to halve those of the entire planet by mid-century).
You can listen to One Planet, or download it as a podcast, by visiting the BBC World Service's One Planet website .
Now in the year 3991, his world is down to three super-nations, each competing for dwindling resources, and a planet left scarred by multiple nuclear wars.
Plainly, Asia and the rest of the world could be facing a major struggle to ensure that the impoverished of Planet Earth wouldn't be written off by a group of American experts, no matter how brilliant and well-meaning they may be.
But let's not forget that the extremes were produced on a planet that has warmed by "only" 0.7C in a century.
The technique uses distant light amplified by the gravity of a massive star or planet to create an astronomical magnifying lens.
It holds that the Moon formed from the debris kicked into orbit by the collision of a smaller proto-planet with the infant Earth.
"Six Degrees", by leading environmental campaigner Mark Lynas, sounds a red alert for the health of the planet, charting degree-by-degree the likely consequences of rising temperatures up to the worst-case scenario 5.8 degrees Celsius (10 degrees Fahrenheit) rise envisaged by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2001 report.
We needed a picture of the planet taken by the machine that now bears the great man's name.
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It is the third criterion that is being targetted by those who would see Pluto reinstated as a planet.
The Great Dark Spot seen by Voyager 2, a probe which investigated the planet in 1989, disappeared within a year.
This may be achieved by increasing the surface reflectivity of the planet, for example by brightening human structures, planting crops with a higher albedo, or covering deserts with reflective material.
Demographic experts estimate that by 2035, our planet will be home to a little over eight billion humans.
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Make them common, by digging them out of the heart of a shattered planet, and they will become cheap.
In the show, the race of Daleks was said to have been developed by a scientist to survive a war on their home planet of Skaro.
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If so, you might be familiar with RSS, a technology used by nearly every blog on the planet to allow readers to view entries in the program of their choice.
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